| 200motels POLITICS |
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| Americans hate New York City for the same reason that the rest of the world loves us, because everything is happening here.We suck all the oxygen out of the whole rest of the country and all eyes are constantly on us. You don’t have to come here if you don’t want to.New York doesn’t need anybody.Anyway, whether you visit us or not your money winds up here eventually.Choke on it.At the beginning of the baseball season, when the Yankees were clutching and suffering from terrible pitching and fielding, when the collective neurotic dysfunction of the whole team had landed it in the cellar, when they had to call in a priest to perform the last rites on manager Joe Torre’s leadership, the rest of the country was singing and dancing in the streets that the Bombers had finally fizzled out to a damp firecracker. Oh boy, were the rubes living in the catbird seat, watching Yankee fans wring out their soggy handkerchiefs!The chief beneficiaries fo this hex were the Mets.With all the Dominican stars the Mets have got playing for them, not to forget general manager Omar Minaya, this writer seriously believed that they were sticking pins in Yankee dolls in a secret Santeria ceremony.The only Yankee to be immune to the Santeria hex was A-Rod who, being Dominican himself, received a secret midnight visit from Benny Katz, the Santeria rabbi of Sosúa, who rubbed Rodriguez’ bat with consecrated chicken fat and prayed to Moses, Jesus and Gombi.As a result, even as the team sank deeper and deeper into the morass A-Rod continued to explode. Now, New Yorkers are very phony and superficial people.They speak with phony accents, and you believe you’re speaking to a Shakespearean actor like John Gielgud only to discover that the guy’s an illiterate stevedore from Jersey City.New Yorkers will tell you a lie even when the truth will work just as well, just to keep in practice.They only love money and they only love winners.When Mother Teresa visited New York somebody stole her wooden bowl that she ate gruel from.Aristophanes, the legendary Greek who wandered the streets at night with a lantern in search of an honest man, came to New York and ended up in the alley behind The Gentlemen’s Club II in Long Island City with the lantern lodged up his butt. During the time of their slump, all the Yankees fans took a powder.Not one Yankees fan was to be found anywhere. Except me.I’m too stupid to get with the program.That explains why I’m broke.No matter!I was still trucking around with my Yankees cap and t-shirt, and when former fans would mock and berate me for sticking with that bunch of losers, I would preach forbearance and patience, like a moron. Everybody suffers from a breakdown, I counseled.Even as a stupid billygoat eventually finds his footing on a steep, rocky mountain trail, so the Yankees would eventually recover their composure and once again claw their way to the top. I was like a mystic crawling through the desert. One day I happened to find myself on the oceanfront promenade at Riis Park in Rockaway, Ground Zero of Mets fans.My Yankees t-shirt was filthy and torn, from people grabbing and ripping it, spitting on it, even.Nonetheless, I refused to take it off, for I had taken a holy vow not to remove it until the Yanks started winning again. At this moment I was confronted by the evil of all evils, a Mets fan.He showed me the finger of contempt and started cursing at me.“Boy, what a loser!What are you doing around here wearing that stinking, filthy rag?” I explained to him meekly, like one of Jesus’ little lambs, “I’m waiting for the Second Coming, when the Yankees shall once again arise and the whole world will amaze at their glory.” “Yeah, you fuckin’ moron!” he screamed.Then he hocked a big goober of phlegm right onto the Yankee emblem on the front of my once- proud shirt, that I had bought in 2000, when we had the subway series and they floated actual subway cars down Broadway on flat- bed trucks in a triumphant victory parade reminiscent of Roman emperor Vespasian’s procession of 51AD. The guy said, “Lissen, stoopid, as long as you’ re here, I just took a crap and there was no toilet paper in the bathroom.Why don’t you give me that piece of shit Yankees shirt so I can wipe my ass with it?”All the people standing around, who were all from Queens and were all Mets fans, started to laugh.“Take off the shirt and let him wipe his ass!” they screamed.“Fuckin’ Yankees ain’t so hot now!” “How you like it now?”“Let the guy wipe his ass with the Yankees shirt ha-ha-ha!” I meekly removed my precious shirt and gave it to the guy, who pushed it down the back of his pants and cleaned his butt with it.When he pulled it back out it had a shiny brown skid mark right down the front of it, right on the Yankees emblem! I put the shirt back on.Now the guy was really worked up.“Every day the Yankees get their ass kicked the whole country rejoices.We’re sick of the Yankees and we’re sick of Manhattan acting like they’re better than us!” “What if the Yanks get back on top?” I asked. “Never happen.You’re just a bunch of stooges. Now the Mets are king.Go back to the city and tell all the other Yankee faggots that you are now our slaves and we rule the world!Now get th’ fuck outta here before I lose my temper!” My girlfriend and I walked away.She said, “How can you wear that shirt after he used it to wipe his ass?It stinks!” I said, “I want this to remind me.I’m only taking it off when the Yanks get back on top.” For months I wore the shirt, refusing to take it off or wash it.I kept the smell of the Mets fan’s butt in my nostrils as I fervently prayed for the Yankees to regain their power.One night I was alone in the darkened parking lot of Yankee Stadium, praying to the big Yankees sign.My knees were torn and bloody from having crawled all the way up from the East Side of Manhattan as a gesture of faith, like an Indian Sufi pilgrim crawling thousands of miles to the shrine at Amritsar.In the depths of my delirium I say a shimmering portal of light begin to glow in front of me, scaring the dickens out me, and through this dazzling curtain he stepped into my presence. Not Jesus, you schmuck, BILLY MARTIN! He had his manager’s uniform and cap on, and his World Series ring.I started to sweat bullets. “Billy!” I exclaimed. He blew his cigar smoke in my face.“Kid,” he said, “all your praying and crazy stunts and that stinking t-shirt are distracting me and the boys up there in The Big Yankees Dugout In The Sky.You’re throwing us off our game, right in the middle of the final game of our series against the Brooklyn Dodgers.We’re in extra innings.” “Yeah?Wow!What inning is it?” “About nineteen thousand, I think.Why don’t you lay off and let the universe unfold as it should?Get a life!” “But Billy, there’s nobody left who believes in the Yankees.Everybody is driving German cars and going out to the Hamptons and paying $100 a pound for lobster salad.” Billy reflected for a minute.Then he told me, “You know what the palm tree said to the hurricane? ‘Stop blowing so hard.My nuts are flying off.’You’re a regular Mother Teresa.” “What do you mean?I’m a sinner!I think impure faults.I lie, I steal, I have unprotected sex with non-human species!” “So start your own church.That way you can make the rules.”With that Billy Martin turned his back on me and strode back into the ring of flames, leaving me alone in the dark parking lot. I sprang into action.I ran around to the back of the Fairway Supermarket and found some old cardboard boxes.Using my trusty box-cutter I cut out some really, really neat wings and a halo, covered them in aluminum foil and attached them to my body.I got a milk crate and took it over to the entrance to the stadium. Getting up on the milk crate, I started to preach to the assembled masses who were streaming in to see the game: “Brothers and sisters, welcome to The First Church of the Yankees.I’ll be honest witch yez. Billy Martin appeared to me in a shimmering rain of light and told me to preach the Gospel of Baseball to yez!Look, we been going through hell.We got guys like Igawa who can’t pitch for shit; Carl Pavane, who got paid forty million bucks, and he doesn’t even show up anymore!We got injuries, psychological dysfunction, mental and spiritual indecision. Steinbrenner’s senile.Through it all, Joe Torre’ s imitating the Sphinx of Egypt.Our pitching stinks and we don’t have any left-handers. Remember, God can’t be everywhere at once and that’s why he invented left-handed relievers.You can’t pitch Andy Pettitt every night! “Joba Chamberlain is only allowed to pitch one inning every two games.What if they would have done that to Catfish Hunter or Whitey Ford?Remember, any muscle not in constant use will tend to atrophy and wither away! “There is a spiritual imbalance.Nobody wants to steal bases any more.Too much work.The stadium is infested with squirrels, which is a sure sign of demonic possession. “But the worst of it, the absolute worst, is the indifference and moral relativism on the part of the fans, who are the sea in which the Yankees must swim to survive.Everywhere I go, I hear the same defeatism, ‘It’s a game,’ I hear, ‘It’s just a game!!’ “Well, I’m here to tell you – IT’S NOT JUST A GAME!THE YANKEES ARE LIFE ITSELF!!! What would New York be without Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig and Joe DiMaggio?Without Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris! “We have to go back to the old ways and be ready to lay down our lives for the Yankees, like they have laid down their lives for us!” Now the crowd was getting hot.They were turning into a rowdy army of baseball fanatics, just like I pictured it.We started to sing The Yankee Anthem, which I had just written: Oh Yankees Yankees Kings of the world We swear allegiance To your flag unfurled Never again the world will see A team as great as the Yankees Your glory is great as the skies And nobody beats you at catching flies Yankee Stadium is where it’s at The world will bow before the glory of your bats A fastball a slider a change-of-pace Nothing can top your bullpen ace Oh Yankees the world will never see A team to equal your gloryyyyyy! AMEN The whole Bronx rose up as one to sing The Yankee Anthem, and I realized I wasn’t leading an army anymore, I was leading a crusade!I exhorted the mob, “Let’s march on Shea Stadium, Satan’s nest of demons, and annihilate the infidel unbelievers from the face of the earth!” We marched down Bruckner Boulevard, across the Whitestone Bridge and onto Shea, only to discover that the godless Mets had already engineered their own comeuppance, contriving to blow a seven and a half game lead on the last day of the season.Mets fans, stupefied by the unspeakable horror of their curse, were pitching themselves en masse over the edge of the upper level.Me and my army of Yankee crusaders could only bear witness in mute horror as the obese, bloated corpses of Mets fans exploded like water balloons upon impact with the expensive seats. Me and my gang fell to our knees and begged forgiveness for their immortal souls from the pantheon of Yankee gods assembled in the heavens.But I still had one piece of unfinished business – the creep who had wiped his butt with my Yankee t-shirt, which I was still wearing.I marched my army down through Queens to the promenade at Riis Park, where we found the bastard and surrounded him. Quaking, he pleaded insanity: “Believe me, I forgot to take my meds that day!”His knees were knocking in fear.“I wish I could make amends.” “Well, you can,” I told him, whipping off my Yankee t-shirt, which like a heroic flag, was ripped and torn, covered with spit, urine and butt stains from months of abuse from Mets fans.“Your butt loves my shirt so much, right? Well, now it’s going to love it even more.I’m commanding you to shove it up your ass. “And just to help you, I’ve got my assistant, Chuck Schwartz, formally of the seventieth precinct of the New York Police Department, who is an expert at shoving toilet plungers up guys’ asses.Chuck, come on up here!”Chuck Schwartz appeared before the crowd, a shiny new toilet plunger in his hand.“Chuck, I commanded, “take your weapon of mass destruction and install the t-shirt up his ass, and MAKE SURE YOU USE THE BIG END TO DO IT!” Chuck expertly bent the Mets fan over, pulled his pants down and, using the rubber of the toilet plunger, rammed the Yankees t-shirt up his ass.As he withdrew the plunger from the guy’s rectum it made a huge sucking sound, which resounded up and down the beach.The guy moaned, “Oh, fuck, I’m gonna need a truss!” Well, the Yankees made the playoffs but, unfortunately they had to play against Cleveland, which, stinking like a huge outhouse, is consequently infested with flies, which got in Joba Chamberlain’s eyes, and he threw away the ball, and with it the game. Things turned out better for me, though.I have my own church now, right on the spot where Billy Martin appeared to me.It’s the only church where you can buy beer and hot dogs during the service, and I’m making good money from the concessions. We have our own ladies’ auxiliary of girls in hot pants and knotted t- shirts, and I preach the gospel according to Casey Stengel.Every time the Yanks hit a homer, pinstripe-clad monks ring the church bells, which can be heard peeling throughout the Bronx and Manhattan too. Over the alter I have a stained glass window of two catcher’s mitts joined together on prayer, with the motto “There’s always next season.” |
| The Yankees Army |
| 200motels BASEBALL |
| Comedy |
| Tragedy |
| Nonsense |
| Bullshit |
